Welcome to How the Money. I'm Joel and I am Matt and today we're talking debt free degrees with Jason Brown.
That's right, man, we are going to talk about getting your degree debt free with Jason Brown. And just to set it up for folks, Jason, he's a friend of ours. He's actually local here in Atlanta, so he has joined us in our in the How to Money clubhouse. I'm not necessarily gonna I'm not gonna call it a studio per se. He is here in person, which is a ton of fun. But Jason, he's contributed to the site, to our site, how to Money. He's written a ton
of articles there. He's got three kids. Congrats by the way, on the you got the new guy there and so you born. But you've written multiple books Margin Matters, It is possible another one. But you've talked about achieving getting your degree debt free, and specifically with student loans were starting, we felt that who better to have here on the podcast to talk about not only paying off student loans, but specifically graduating debt free and avoiding those student loans
to begin with. So Jason, thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast.
Wow, that was an amazing introduction there. I really appreciate it. Probably the best I've ever had. I really appreciate great to be with you guys in person, and I can only hope and pray that whatever I say just helps the next generation absolute absolutely avoid the dreaded student loan debt.
So one other thing I'll mention is that I don't know if there is anybody else I know that.
Is taller than Joel. So Joel is a pretty what are you? You're like sixx six five sixty six and Jason is probably six to seven, you know, six seven six eight.
Here's the story. I've been telling everybody, I'm six foot eight. But then they had at the office, they had the biometric screening and the guys come in, you know, they do your height and weight and I and I wait, I measured in it six foot seven. So I can only believe that gravity, old age bringing me down. So now I have to change, you know, my driver's license. I'm six foot seven. Now that's what we're going with.
And I'm not used to looking up with people. I don't like it, Jason, but I still like hanging out with you anyway. But are Okay. The first question we ask anybody who comes on the podcast, as you know, is what do they like to sporge on? Matt and I we sporge on craft beer. We're drinking a pale al right now, what is that for you? While you're saving investing? What do you kind of spurge on from time to time while you're doing the right thing with your money?
Now, as you said, I have three boys, seven, three and five months, so at this stage of life, I'm not splurging on anything for myself.
As you guys know, diapers, right, yeah, maybe a sleep mask for you and your wife, perhaps.
Your white noise machine. But the equivalent, I will say, the equivalent to to what you guys do with your with your beer is I am a seven eleven slurpy snob. Okay, so here's the thing, seven eleven slurpies. Here in Georgia, there are no seven elevens, So I can't get a slurpe anywhere. So I have to go down to Florida. They're they're real big in Florida. You'll find them in
certain cities in Florida on every street corner. Now, the thing about seven elevens, you have to go to a different seven eleven, you have to go to all of them because they all have different flavors, flavor selections.
Really, yeah you did not know.
Yeah, it's pretty amazing.
Wow.
So but but the seven eleven Slurpy I've always been a slurpe snob. I've always thought that was the best you know drink, you know, refreshment you can get.
Some would say like high end Scotch. You're like, no, no, no, slurpyn Surpy is the way to go.
Now. I just found this out. Somebody sent me like a Facebook message or something to say, hey, you realize you can get slurpees at Speedway. I was like, what are you talking about? Well, apparently the company that owns seven eleven they just bought Speedway the gas station, the gas station chap and there's actually two speedways that are closed. There's one in Alpharetta, Georgia, and there's one in Cardigsvill, Georgia. And I've already been to both to confirm this. So
this is true. At Speedway they have the seven eleven slurpey machines inside the Speedway gas stations. There are some now in Georgia. If you're in the area.
I'm glad you can get your fix without having to drive seven hours, you know, because then it truly is a splurge for you to have to drive to another state. It takes a while to get down to Florida.
That's a good point because it's you know, it's a dollar drink, so it's you know, really not a splurge, but then hundred bucks and gas though, debt's the slurge and the time to get there.
Yeah, I love that one. Let's start talking about kind of the subject and hey, let's talk about debt, free degrees and paying for college and payments like we, like Matt said at the beginning, they're about to restart on student loans in just a few days. We all know that student loan debt is a massive problem. This is something you've been highlighting for a bunch of years in your work. Can you put it into context for us though?
Can you kind of maybe share some numbers and talk about some people have called it a crisis, like is is student loan debt a crisis? Yeah?
You know, I've got some pretty strong opinions on all. Yes, it's a crisis, but yet it to me, it's a student loan debt crisis. But it's also a student loan debt scam because young seventeen eighteen year old kids are being presented with only one option to go to college debt. And actually I interviewed a girl in my book and she told me the story. She said, when I went to the orientation session at her university, they set her
down and they said, you have three options. These are your options to pay for school, Option A, B, and C. All the options were debt. Those are the only options that she was presented. And she said, Jason, if my dad wasn't in the room with me, he grabbed my arm and dragged me out of the room, or else I would have just signed one of these contracts. I'm taken debt out now. To your point, Joel, we're looking at seventy percent of students take out loans to help
pay for colleges. That's a tremendous amount.
Sounds low to me. Oh, you're thinking it's higher. I was thinking it would be more even like that, But that's still a lot.
It's significant. And the big problem, guys is the people that I feel for the most is that we have in our country forty percent of all college students never graduate. They drop out for whatever reason, they run out of mind, any life happens, you know, maybe they start a family or whatever. There's lots of reasons why people don't make it through college. But those are the people that have gone through taken out debt, but never.
Got the degree.
So those are the people that are really suffering the most with the student loan debt.
Crist I agree, those people are behind the a ball to the biggest extent because no degree, no increased earnings oftentimes to show for the work, but they saw the debt alongside it.
Yeah, it's like a double whammy in effect. So given that, given the fact that there are a lot of folks who aren't even graduating, so they're not you know, they don't have the fruit from their labor to show for it.
So that's one. That's one group of folks. But even for the folks who are graduating, who do get the degree, who have the potential for increased earnings, do you feel that the value proposition has changed considering the drastic inflation that we've seen with higher education, specifically with going to college.
So you mean, like, are we talking to Roli?
Yeah, is it worth the money because they're worth for generations, I mean decades.
Like I was.
The thing I was ever told as a little kid growing up, is like you better go to college. And I know my parents enough and they loved me no matter what. And if I had not gone to college, they certainly would have continued to love me, but they would have been disappointed. They would have really been upset. I think if I chose not to unless I had a really great plan something else on the horizon. But for a lot of like a lot of students have been told that they're like, you've got to do this,
no matter the cost. But with the high costs of college, I think there are some folks who are starting to question whether or not it's worth it.
I think you're spot on, guys, And I'm a little bit older than you two, but we're kind of in a similar age range that from our generation. This is one of the American dreams, you know, home ownership, college degree. But let me tell you what. There's only about thirty seven percent of Americans even hold a bachelor's degree. So think about that for a second, and only about a let I think it's thirteen percent, Only about thirteen percent have a master's or higher degree, so it's a it's
a minor, right, and people might not realize that. So here's the thing the ROI is it is college worth it? That's that's the question now. And really what you have to do is you have to really do your due diligence and your research on specific degree courses. What does it relate to in the job market. And one of the pieces of advice that I give people is like, hey, student and parent, go go sit down, Go hire a
career coach. These guys are going to be the ones that can These are the experts that can help you match up a degree program with a career industry. Is it worth it? Is this degree going to translate to a high pain or rewarding career or is this degree going to lead to, you know, a thirty thousand dollars
you know salary, And that's what you have to weigh out. Hey, if you're paying for college on your own and you go debt free and you want to work in nonprofit and make thirty thousand dollars a year, that's you're totally fine because you're not leaving school with eighty thousand dollars. A student loan debt.
But you don't want to get the degree and still be a barista at the end of the day, right, and take on the debt at the same time. Right, that's gonna saddle you down for years to come, but not have the increased income to go. I love that advice of going talk to an expert about that. Let's talk about your story, because you got two debt free degrees, and I want to talk about like how you went
about that. But but what made you initially like see the importance of avoiding debt in order to take on a higher education in the first place, Because, like you said, a lot of people, like the girl you highlighted, would just sign, oh, I'm seventeen, I'm eighteen. I'm like, yeah, well why not if this is the only way, the only options that are being presented, I guess I'll do it. What made you see that there was another path that you needed to take.
That's such a good question. I get that debt question a lot, Joel. And so I went to undergrad and started in nineteen ninety three. Okay, so mid to late nineties. Now, back then, you're not hearing about a student loan, even though there was this student loans was going on, but you don't hear it in the news back then about a student loan debt crisis or anything like that. So
for me, I was just raised. My parents raised me a certain way to you know, avoid debt, to for you can't buy it unless you can afford it right now.
Such an antiquated way of right with the times, Jess, come on, come on now now.
My parents they didn't really like sit me down and teach me about money, like here's how you, you know, balance a budget, here's how you do a check ledger. I just learned from watching them. I never saw my dad go out and buy, you know, a brand new car and drive it home on a whim. I never saw my parents come home on a Friday afternoon, Hey, we're all going to Hawaii next week for nothing like that. There were no big splurges, there were no you know,
frivolous spending. And my parents were both very frugal people. They were very smart with their money, they were savers, and so I just kind of took on that mentality. So when I entered undergrad school in the mid nineties, debt was really not an option for me because I was always taught if you can't pay for it, you can't do it. So that was, you know, my mentality. So I never even thought about taking out a loan. That never even crossed my mind. It was just like, Okay,
well how am I going to pay for this? Let me go work, let me get I was working three, you know, three part time jobs. I was, you know, getting scholarships. I was doing all kinds of stuff resourcefulness, just to make my way through. I was going to school part time because that's all I could afford. I was just kind of pay as you go kind of thing. So so those are some of the things I did. But that was my mentality was It was just like I can only do what I can.
Afford, which forces you to become creative. Yeah.
I was just talking to a buddy and we were talking about like leadership, and he said something along the lines of oftentimes great leaders have like gosh, I wish I could remember the term, but it's like a subconscious competence where you don't even realize it. And it sounds like that you had that to a certain extent when it came to your finances. You were subconsciously competent. You were subconsciously on the right track. But I like that you did take some some specific tactics in order to
ensure that you were not taking on debt. Like can you share some of the some of the different creative ways that you were able to find it not finance but literally paid cash for your college education.
Yeah.
So when I was in school, I was working. I actually this was to the detriment of my GPA by the way, I worked three part time jobs simultaneously, but they were all it was very convenient. So I had two on campus jobs, which I recommend people to do because a lot of on campus jobs they'll they'll pay, you'll get a tuition waiver, and I'll get you a stipend. Now I didn't get those in mind, but I just
got paid like an hourly rate or whatever. But I was the at the time, I wanted to get into sports broadcasting, so I was actually the sports editor for the student newspaper, and then I worked in the sports information department with the athletic department. I was doing a lot of work with them, working for all the athletic teams. And then I also worked a retail job at town Center Mall, which was literally almost across the street from campus.
I worked in like a sports apparel shop and you know, made a whatever the minimum wage was at the time.
Everything sports related there. Yes, there's a common theme. Yes, that was.
My first passion, my first love. Now, on top of just working and you know, kind of paying my way through, I also got scholarships. Later on, I actually worked. I went and worked for Chick fil A. Now, Chick fil A has a really good scholarship program now, but back then, when I was at Chick fil A, I had to be there for two years and I had to work two thousand hours, and then they gave me a thousand
dollars scholarship. Now that might not seem like much in today's age, but back then, you know, I'm so old. We were on the quarter system. I went to Kennesau State here just north of Atlanta, and we were on the quarter system. So a thousand dollars check paid.
For two quarters.
So that paid for seventy five percent of my year pretty much. So that was a huge help. And then so what happened was I was working in the athletic department, and most of that was you got a scholarship.
You were the first non athlete to get a scholarship from the athletic ppartment.
I got to tell that story. So I was working in the athletic department. They had no budget. You know, at the time, they were at Kinnesaull State. You know, it started out as like a junior college and they were like a in AIA school. Then they were INCAA Division two. So they've they've really come a long way.
Hey, we made it to the tournament last year, that's right. Yeah, we played, we had value and effort.
Was it was it the Owls State Owls. Yeah, they made it the first time ever. Last year they made it to the NCAA Men's Ball Yeah, the tournament March Madness. Yeah, the first time ever. So their division one there at the highest level. Now, so back in my day, there was no budget. They couldn't pay me. So what I did was I I kind of used it as internship credit, so I got school credit for working out with them.
But they did pay me to work games. So whenever there was a game, you know, I would work a game and you know, do the announcing or whatever, they run the scoreboard, and I think they paid me like five or ten bucks a game. So I certainly wasn't getting rich off that. But what happened was the athletic director, I think, in his creative way of compensating me because I was always, you know, putting in hours of free labor. So my junior year he put me on a book scholarship.
So my junior year of college, I had all my books paid for by the athletics department and that was a huge, huge help. So then I came back for my senior year and I would is completely shocked to find out that they had put they had given me an athletic scholar, a full athletic scholarship that paid for tuition, books, everything, And uh yes, I was not an athlete. So I hope I didn't take a scholarship away from it from
an athlete. I don't think I did. I think that was just their creative way of compensating me because instead of you know, writing me a check that might to come out of a budget or whatever, they're just like, hey, we'll just you know, we'll waive your tuition in your books. But that was life changing for me, getting a whole year my senior year, a whole year paid for, So that was that was a huge huge help to me.
That is huge.
Well, and so you mentioned books too, because I mean books aren't cheap, and so there are different paths, different routes you can take when it comes to books, Like there are more places you can rent books as opposed to going to the own campus bookstore and buying it brand new, you know, like that spying. Yeah, the spine's never been cracked before. Like what yeah, what what's your take on some of the different ways to cut the cost there?
Now, Now that's a good You've made some good points there, because back in my day, none of those were options you couldn't rent. But so much has changed now that you can really cut down the costs. Back in my day, it was a huge racket. It was a scam, and you would have to you would be forced to buy the new book for the class, and then you would say, oh, well, I'll just sell it back at the end of the quarter.
And then you couldn't sell it back because the next quarter they were moving to a new book exactly, and so your book was worthless. So you had to pay whatever one hundred bucks for a book and then you're stuck with it.
Right, So those books are more than that now and you certainly alludes to the scam portion of the and you got it higher education.
And now you can go on Amazon or eBay or all these you can go sell them online. You couldn't really do it that, you know, in the early nineties, that wasn't really an option either. So so now, back then, yeah, you were, you were held hostage by these book book companies. But now, like you said, Matt, you can actually rent books. You can buy books. I bought now when I went back to school for my grad program, which I'll tell that story in a second too, but you know, this
was more recent. I had the option to rent books to buy books by use books. I bought all my books used off Amazon for dirt cheap, and ironically, it was cheaper for me to buy a book than rent it, or it would either be the same price, like so it would be like I could buy the book for a fifty bucks or I could rent it for fifty bucks for the semester. But hey, I'll just buy the book and then hope to sell it, hope to get half my money back. That was my strategy. So that's
kind of how I handled it. But it really just depends on the class or the book. In some cases it is a lot cheaper to rent it. It might be ten bucks to rent a book versus fifty bucks. Then yeah, then it would make more sense to do that. But there's so much more options now for sure, in the digital age that we and now you know a lot of classes the teachers will just email you a PDF and you can just download the digital version and not have to pay a thing.
Sometimes you can ask the teacher, hey, do you teach to the book? Do you use the book or or is it all based on lecture? And so they might have one in the syllabusity you might be able to get by without having the book at all. Just depends on the class, right. But you also, one of the tactices you took with to go part time to school, so it took you longer to get your degree, but it allowed you then to have some of those part
time jobs. Did you like run a cost benefit analysis on that or do you feel like you missed out on potential years of increased income growth because it took you longer to get your degree, Like what was your thought process on that? And do you think going to school part time makes sense for more people?
Well, Joel, those are excellent questions, but when I was twenty years old, I certainly wasn't there that strategically, to be honest with you, I actually had some health situations in college that kind of caused me to fall behind and caused me to go part time. So actually, you know, I kind of follow that statistic of like I think it's like sixty four percent of students take longer than
four years. So that's another thing that people have to budget for, is that most students take over four years on average to graduate. But for my story, I ran into some health issues that kind of derailed me a little bit. But also, yes, my strategy was, hey, I'm only going to, you know, go to school for I can afford. I can afford two classes this quarter, or
one class or three classes, whatever it may be. That's where I can afford, just because I didn't want to go into any debt and I didn't want to fall behind. I didn't want to drop out either, Like I didn't want to be like, oh, well this quarter, I you know, it would be great if I just worked and just skipped a quarter. Because I saw what happened was I saw a lot of my peers doing that, and then now they would I'll never see him come back to school.
Right, It's like you stop the habit, you stop going to class, and then you're like, ah, maybe i'll take another quarter off too, and then after a little while, you just stop.
Going to school, right, So like for me, you know, And another thing was I got so far behind. I actually had to go to summer school three years in a row, just it took me about five and a half years to graduate. So my last three years I was going to school, I was going to summer school. Actually I was going to school year round for my last three years of school, just so I could graduate
in five and a half years. But no, I didn't really think of lost income or anything like that, because at the time that I graduated, you know, I wanted to get into the sports industry, and evidently it's extremely difficult to get into the sports industry because everybody wants to work in sports. It's highly competitive. So it actually took me about a year to land a full time job in the sports world. So so I kind of knew that I was facing that as well.
You know, that's this is actually one of the reasons I'm such a fan of different tech schools that have like the co op programs where to I don't know it exactly, I didn't live it myself, but you know, you go to school for a semester, you work for a semester, but you're actually earning an income, and I think that the ability for you to use some of that income to pay for your schooling is pretty huge.
But we're gonna continue our conversation with you, Jason. We're gonna continue to talk about how it is you can get these debt free degrees, not just how, but also why that is so important to do.
We'll get all that right after this. All right, we're back. We're still talking about debt free degrees with the guy who is the expert of this, Jason Brown, and he's live in studio with us here in the How To Money Clubhouse. So Jason studio audience, Oh if only, if only we have just Matt, can you play the clap sounder right now? So? Yeah, I think this is so important now as like student loans are our repayments are beginning, and a whole lot of people are like they feel
stuck because the student loans. Why is it such a passion of yours to convince folks to get a degree with without taking on any debt at all, like taking it off the table.
It's it's so disheartening to see what's happening to you know, forty five plus million Americans that are are really struggling with these student loans because they were sick whatever seventeen eighteen, nineteen years old, and they didn't understand, you know, what they were signing. They didn't understand how interest rates work. They didn't understand, like, you know, each year the cost
of college goes up. So they're looking at expenses for year one and they're just say, oh, ten thousand dollars a year, okay, so that time's four is forty thousand dollar. That's all I'm gonna Oh when they realize, when they don't think, oh, it might take me five or six years to graduate, and oh every year the cost of college probably goes up by at least ten percent. So those are things that people don't really you know, aren't really aware of.
I guess. So forty turns into fifty five, and.
It quickly, yeah, it quickly you know, gets out of hand and like me, like, hey, I graduated my undergrad and it took me almost I was living at home and looking for a job for almost a year, working part time jobs, you know, folding clothes at retail at the mall.
And were you one of the gap guys that would stand there, you know and like greet people as they're walking in.
Oh, he's abercarme and Fitch.
Come on, I actually work, that's close. I actually worked at a store called Galleons, which was bought out by Dicks. So if you know Dick's Sporting Goods, I basically worked at a Dicks and I worked in men's apparel. So I was sitting there forty shirts I was folding. I wasn't greeting people, probably because I'm too tall and I would scare people off. But I was kind of in the back folding all the shirts. So like guys like you,
like yourself. You guys would come in up all the shirt, all these shirts, right, let me mess up the rack and then I have to come behind you and put everything back on the hangars.
We actually did that as a way to help people get employed, like yourself. Like it was like, hey, if we mess up more shirts, there's more jobs for people to fold shirts, right, it's.
The broken windows theory. If we smash all these window somebody's got a.
Like your favorite place, you're basically creating jobs for us. Yes, it's very kind of you guys.
Really stimulating the economy as much as we can. Well, so, I mean, what of the ways you can get a degree without spending? Uh Like, let's just talk about I'm thinking about specifically. We had an ask how to money question and a listener she's up in South Carolina and her employer one of the benefits they offered was to cover her grad school. She was going back to get
an MBA. How popular are these different programs becoming the ability to You're basically increasing how much it is that you can earn at your employer's expense, basically.
Right, I'm so glad you brought that up, Matt, because that's actually wanted to touch on that a little bit because I went back to grad school a kind of uh A. Graduated in twenty eighteen, so not too too long ago. But this is what I did. So I actually was an employee. I went back to my alma mater and was an employee at Kannessau State. So as an employee, they have a it's called a TAP program with STANS with tuition assistance program, and so as an employee,
they covered all my tuition. Now I still had to pay for books out of pocket. So I started grad school KSU paid for my tuition. I had to pay for my books. So then I actually changed jobs. I went back to the private sector. And then when I changed jobs, I was preparing me and my wife were preparing to pay out of pocket for the rest of my schooling and I was looking at about twenty seven
hundred bucks a semester. Luckily, I was toward the end of my I only had like two semesters left, so I was like, Okay, you know, we can do this. But when I was hired by my new job, I was going through all the benefits package and I noticed tuition reimbursement program. Wait a minute, what is this sign Let me sign up. That's the first thing I did on the first day. I was saying, Hey, give me the application for this tuition reaber.
How does this work?
Let me sign up for But here's the thing. This is such an amazing trend that we're seeing now with all these companies are offering tuition reimbursement or or like some sort of assistance, even if it's not one hundred percent, it might be fifty percent or whatever it may be. And especially like for me, you know, I'm a writer, so I went back to school and got a professional
writing degree. So if it's related to your position, your company is more than likely going to want to help you with that because it's going to make you a better employee for them, and it's going to make you, you know, a more well rounded and it's going to
increase your skill set. So you know, we see you know, all the big name companies in the news, you know, Target Publics, Costco, Starbucks, Starbucks, all the big name companies, the big brands they get they're the ones that get all the headlines for doing this, and there's a lot of them now. But this is an exciting trend to see a lot of people are kind of jumping on this bandwagon to offer tuition you know, reimbursement or tuition assistant as an employee. And that's so that's so great
to see. So I'm going to tell your audience, Hey, if you guys are like looking to change jobs or maybe you know or you're in the job market or whatever, and you never finish your degree, or you want to pick up an extra degree, maybe go back to school, get a master's or something. Make sure that that company that you're looking at hiring or looking at interviewing with, make sure that they offer a tuition reimbursion worker. That's a huge benefit.
Yeah. Yeah, we always talk about total compensation. It's not
just the headline salary number. There's all those other benefits that you want to take into consideration, because you might be willing to get paid eight thousand dollars less because oh wait, there's a better match and oh wait, they'll pay for me to go back to school, and oh wait, they'll do more flexibility, like all of his other things add up, right, And so we should make a decision about where we work based on the abundance of benefits,
not just the salary. Talk to me about like where we choose to go to school, because that makes a difference in the price too. And I think one of the things that we've done to a lot of young kids, it's like, oh, go go to the school that makes your heart flutter or something like that, Right, it's like go to your dream school. Well, how would you talk to a teenager who's thinking about where they go to where they go to school. They kind of dream school
versus a practical, cheaper alternative. It's a financial and an emotional conundrum. How do you help people think through that?
Yeah that when you ask me that question, I think about my own kids. I have three boys, So when they get of age, you know, what would I tell them? That's exact question you said, what would I say? So our world is changing and there's so many alternatives to traditional college now. But the first thing, the number one thing that I tell people is if you make one decision, just one, just make one decision, and if you want to go to college, go to an in state public school.
If you go to an in state public school, you will save tens of thousands of dollars just by making that one decision. But regarding alternative now, see, we live in this digital technology age where there's so many alternatives to school. There's online college, which is so much less expensive. There's you can go to technical or it's called you know,
technical or trade school, sometimes still called vocational school. There's that route that you can go which is much less expensive and much and a lot of times a fraction of the time too, So you got to look at the financial commitment and the time commitment. So and there's so many other opportunities, Like there's apprenticeship pro you talked about co ops, Matt, and that's kind of similar to
like an apprenticeship program. There's apprenticeship programs. I have friends that have taken gone to like culinary apprenticeship schools where it's like a nine month program and they pay ten thousand dollars, and but they're getting placed in like you know, high end restaurants, they're getting placed in catering companies. They're getting placed you know, they're learning how to launch a lot of these guys go on and launch a food truck business, or they launch a catering business, or they
become you know, renowned chefs. So and they're going to school for nine months and paying ten thousand dollars to do that versus you know, a traditional college route, which is so much more expensive.
So there's so.
Many more options out there now. I mean, I hear stories about people just going on YouTube and watching videos for free. There's a lot of free online courses too, if you're just interested, and this is a great way to like kind of process of elimination, Like, hey, I'm kind of interested in social media, but you know, I don't know if I want to really pay to go get a digital marketing degree. Well, hey, there's probably a free digital marketing course, like an intro course or a
fundamental course that you can find online. Take it and see if that's you know, your cup of tea, see something that you want to pursue.
What your whistle just a bit kind of like dip your toe in and then decide, oh, don't want to keep going on in.
This direction exactly exactly well, I mean, and that's one of the things when it comes to staying in state and paying the in state tuition rate finding maybe a local community college, is that you are able to do some of this discovery process at a much reduced price. And the problem is is when a lot of times kids are going, like they do, have their heart set on a private, out of state school, and during the first two years, that's when they're kind of figuring out
what it is that they love. Boh, not to mention that they're paying, you know, fifty thousand dollars a semester while they're all so racking up other expenses because cost of living might be higher in some of those in some of those cities. But so you actually, a couple of minutes ago you mentioned your wife, Okay, and you so you got your degrees debt free, and you're talking about when you went back to grad school that this is something that you and your wife are you know,
it's a decision that y'all were making together. She wasn't so fortunate when it came to the degree and the price that she paid for. How did you approach your finances, Like, did y'all combine your money? Did you see, because we talked about this recently with the rad coaches about combining your finances? How did you view the sixty thousand dollars that was essentially now yours after you were being so diligent and careful with your finances.
Yes, that's such a good, good question man. So yeah, I have a unique kind of perspective in that I was fortunate to earn two debt free degrees, and then when I got married, my wife had had an undergraduate bachelor's degree. We actually went to the same school at different times, but she cared about sixty thousand dollars a student loan debt, So Basically what we did was that
we got real aggressive and paying that off. And I basically told her my story of like, hey, I had a debt free journey before, like when I was single, I paid off thirteen thousand, five hundred dollars in credit card debt, making only twenty three thousand dollars a year and did that in thirteen months. So I told her that whole story about how I got on a budget stuff.
But she's like, oh, yeah, she does. She really she took to it.
Man, she was really like okay, you know, and she started writing things down and taking notes and stuff. But I will say, here's the thing. When we first got married and this you guys are both married. This is gonna be a fun question. What are the top two questions that people at right when you get married? The top two things that everybody starts asking you this kids?
Yeah, that's why. Big one.
When are you going to have kids?
Yeah? Do you know what? The other one? Well, what is the other one that you would ask someone who just got married?
Just got married? What are two major life you know?
Just where are you going to live? Right?
More specifically, when are you going to buy a big house? When are you going to buy a house. Oh, when are you guys going to buy a house, because we were living in a condo. When are you guys going to buy a house. When are you guys going to have kid? Like we just got married, like five minutes, saigo, man,
give us a chance to go on our honeymoon. So those are the big questions, and we answered every single one of those people with not until we get out of debt, not until we pay off this student loan debt. We're paying off this debt first. So that was our goal and we were. My wife was twenty eight at the time, and she made a very aggressive proclamation. She says, I'm paying off this debt by the time I turned thirty the thirtieth birthday, so she gave herself two years.
She said, but what a time I turned thirty, I'm having this debt paid for. I was like, I don't know if we're going to do it. You know, we weren't making that much money at the time. We were each making thirty k a year. We had a combine you know, oh, your finance question, We did combine finances for that question. So we were making a combined sixty thousand a year so that's basically and we did it. We paid it off in two years.
So how did you do that? Because that sounds crazy. Hey, we're making sixty k of mind we paid off sixty k worth it day in two years. What tactics did you use?
We we well, first of all, we were in the position to delay. You know, we didn't have any kids, so we put off having kids, we put off having buying a house, we put off you know, big vacations. We didn't really eat out that much, you know, all the all the normal stuff.
Right, Just did you grow up in the Midwest?
Like I feel like so much of what you're saying, Like like we were saying earlier, it goes contrary to the I hate to say this, but sort of like the entitlement attitude of like, well we're gonna do that, we're gonna get the thing now, we're gonna buy it now, we're gonna pay for it later.
But that's not at all the approach all took. It's the B and pl mindset, the buy now, pay later mindset that's so prevalent these days.
Right, So we just you know, we got on a budget, but we did you know, we did a lot of crazy things. Like my wife actually was working as a nanny at the time, So when you work as a nanny, you get a lot of opportunities to babysit or like to do overnight you know, stuff like babysitting stuff. So she picked up any extra workshit that she could in that realm, and then you know we did We did all kind of stuff. We did garage sales. I was selling stuff online eBay and Craigslist and all that stuff.
I was doing manual labor side jobs. People are hiring me to help them move and stuff. And you know, I was doing like car detailing people's cars, all kind of random stuff to make money. Of course, we any tax return money we got, we would save that and throw it towards the debt. Another thing we did that that was really lucrative was all these like a you guess with like these marketing studies or focus groups, like
some of these pay big money. And uh, my wife and I combined, I think we made like eight thousand dollars over the course of a couple of years. Like just doing like taste tests or mock juries are big.
I'll do it. I'll do the taste test one. Yeah, Jason the Human Science Experiment.
But I want to tell you guys, the craziest thing that we did this was when you reflect that it's this is really embarrassing, Okay. That that we did to try to make extra money was we started my wife has a diet coke addiction. Okay, So I started noticing like all these diet coke cans, you know, piling up in the track. It's like, now, wait a minute, we could probably recycle these and you know, make some money. There's a you know, one of those metal recycling shops,
you know, not far from our house. So I said, let's just start saving up the cans and you know, we'll run them down there. And and so we got we we kind of went overboard with it. We were like taking you know, we live in a complex, so they have their little recycling center.
So we would go.
And go take people's cans that they left in the recycling We would take their bags of cans. We went on a beach trip in Florida and at the end of the day we would just walk the beach with trash bags, just picking up. They probably thought that we were city workers just picking up trash. We're just picking up cans, beer cans, go get they forgot their vests. But yeah, what are these guys. Oh that's how they must be. Uh, you know they must have community service hours. Us these guys are prisoners.
It could, it could very well.
But so we're picking up cans, you know, we're taking cans. So here's the thing. I'm embarrassed. I don't even want to know how many hours that we we did this, and we made a grand total of one hundred and twenty dollars recycling cans.
So maybe in retrospect, you didn't all your time enough to do in that pursuit. But overall, like you're doing everything that you possibly can and you're on the same page. It sounds like too, Like I guess I'm curious now, Yeah, that you're quite a few years removed from paying off your wife's degree in kind of like record time. How do you look back on those years where you were like the belt was tight and there wasn't a lot of money to do extra things. How do you think about that time?
To me, like, when you look at our story, I just feel like, hey, we made a lot of sacrifices, but it was only temporary. It was a two year. It was two years. It was a short just look at just like when I was in grad school. When I started grad school, I felt like I was in prison. I was like, oh my gosh, what have I done to myself? I'm never going to get through this. But it was really like I just took it one day at a time and I just said to myself, you know,
this is all temporary. You're going to get through it. It's a short amount of time in the grand scheme of life. Same thing with the debt journey. Hey, you can do this. You can make sacrifices. You know, I went an entire year without eating out at a restaurant. Now it happened to be the COVID year, and we also had a big so that helped too.
But you weren't going to anyway.
Yeah, yeah, but I mean you can do it. Like it's when you say that, like I'm going to go an entire year without going out to a restaurant, fast food or restaurant, You're like, that's impossible.
Most people would say going an entire week seriously.
So so it's just I want to give hope and encouragement to people, to your audience, that's in this situation, like, look, it can be done. It takes your baby steps change it. It's it's all about changing your mindset. It's all about you know, behavior modification, and you can do it and just just think it's it's only temporary. You're going to get through it. And that that's I love telling people. That love encouraging people.
Yeah, no, I love that encouragement, and that encouragement I think goes a long way, because Yeah, when you feel like it can't be done, when you're hearing the guy who did it and he's telling you you can do it too. That I mean, there's a reason people want to pay money to listen to the best motivational speakers, and I think that's a really motivational but it's also a practical and reality based message that you're that you're giving.
All Right, We've got a couple more questions we want to get to with you, Jason, and we want to ask you about writing books too, so we'll get to that right after this. All right, we are back from the break talking with Jason Brown about how to get that higher education without going into debt. And Jason, I love that you're sharing some of the different ways that you were. I mean, y'all are just hustling when it came to finding ways specifically to pay off your wife's debt.
Let's talk about duel enrollment because it makes me think about I've got a buddy and he he's got four kids, but two of his kids are in high school. He's got a senior, he's got a junior. His senior literally is taking all of her classes at the local university. His junior she's literally only taking one class. She didn't even get a parking.
Pass this year at the local high school because she's like, what's the point I don't need to go through all of.
That, don't need to pay for that.
No, And so talk to us a little bit about dual enrollment. I didn't realize that that was something that you can do at at a younger age like that. It wasn't even on my radar at all when I was in high school.
Yeah, this is a this is a funny story how I found out about this. So I'm sitting in grad school at Kansas State University, and I'm in a creative writing class and I'm forty years old, Okay, and this kid comes into class and he sits next to me, and you know, he's in the class and I look over. I'm like, he's seven. I'm like, who are you? He showed me he's seventeen. You know. To me, he's a kid. Okay,
he's seventeen. I start talking to him like, hey, you know, I introduced myself and I've come to find out he's seventeen and he's in high school. And I'm like, I turned to him, I'm like, how are you here? And he says, oh. He starts talking to me about this dual enrollment process.
His name Doogie Howser.
I honestly can't say it might have been. So he starts telling me about this duel enrollment program and how it works and stuff. And I'm sitting there at the time, I got a two year old son, and I'm sitting there furiously writing notes, writing everything that he's saying because I'm trying to figure out how to enroll my two year old into this. So basically his story was he
was going to a local high school. He had graduated a semester early, so he I guess works his schedule out as class schedule to where he finished high school a semester early. So I guess his last semester in high school, he's going to take college classes like at
my school at KSU. So basically what he was going to do was in the fall, he was going to go to the University of Alabama, and I think he said he was going to study like civil engineering or something like that, and he was going to start out as a sophomore. So not only has he cut out the time, he's cut out a year, but he's also cut out the time and the finances. So and this is all paid for by the state. And I started asking, like, how does this work? How do you qualify for it?
Do you have to have like a four point zero and be like, you know, star student, perfect attendance to be a Valatorian?
That's what I thought.
He says, no, no, you just He's like, you just apply for it. And he says, a state pace for everything. They pay for tuition, they pay for your books, everything. And then when he goes and starts college, he was going to start as a as a sophomore. He was going to eliminate that first year of school. And I was like, this is unbelievably impressive. I was like, this is this and I will say to the audience wherever
state you're in, because these these programs differ by stage. Sure, and even our governor, Governor Kemp, I think he's made some changes to it recently. So just google like whatever you state. We're in Georgia. So if you google like Georgia dual Enrollment program, you'll get all the information UH in the state that you're in. But this is a tremendous UH program to strongly consider for yourself or your kids. That will save you not only time but money. And
it's going to get you. Like you were talking about Joel earlier about you know, did I feel like I was missing out on you know, years of salary. Hey, this guy, uh, he's gonna get He's ahead of his peers now he's going to be graduating a year early. That's one year extra of potential full time salary that he's going to be making while his same age peers are still toiling away in college.
Right, makes you thinking about AP classes too. That's another way that people can kids. You score high enough on the AP exam, which I believe cost you ninety five dollars to take an AP exam, and you basically skip out on potentially a twenty five hundred dollars class. That's right, that's it.
That's a very good comparison the AP classes as well. I researched this for my book too. Actually, I wrote somebody mentioned I had my book done, and somebody mentioned the AP. I said, oh wait a minute, I gotta go, right, I had a section to my book and I got to include this in my book. So the AP thing. Yeah, you're right, you can take AP classes. You can test out of college courses, so then you don't have to pay, you don't have to you're skipping the finances and the time,
so it expedites your college career. Right, very nice. Okay, so you mentioned your book and sounds like you pretty much had it ready to go before you made those edits.
Talk to us about that.
Like, so you've self published, what are the pros? What are the cons from a financial standpoint? Has it netted you know what you thought it would. I'm curious to kind of get some of your thoughts there.
So all I've I've self published three books to Amazon exclusively, so I've written two money related books. Like you guys mentioned the margin matters, and then its possible, and then I actually wrote a non money related book. It's a memoir. Actually, it's a co I co authored it with a Hall of Fame ncaa softball coach who coached at Kittasauw State. He asked me to help him write it. So that's
a sports related memoir. But all through those books, I wrote all through those books, and in about two or three years time, I was working them all simultaneously. But yeah, they're all self published. The difference is if you self published, you're going to get a much higher percent royalties versus if you go with a publishing company. But there's pros and cons of both, right, so if you sign with a publishing company, you're going to get a much smaller
percent of royalties. There's different ways of doing it. Like a lot of our friends of FINCN that I've met at the author table, they'll say, hey, this publisher just cut us a check. They just gave us whatever. They gave us ten thousand dollars to write this book and that was it. That was their payment. That there was no royalties on the back end or anything. There's different ways to do it to set it up. But the thing is, so if you go with the publisher. They're
doing all the work too. They're marketing it, the promoe, voting it, doing the public relations, social media, all that stuff. They're doing the work, except for.
In the modern era podcast you if you want your book to sell, you still got to get out there and be marketing it too. That's right.
You have to do a lot of work too. You have to come on big shows like How to Money, quote yourself. You have to be a self promoter.
We got our fingers crossed that you get you'll get that bump, yeah, exactly. But the publishers aren't just putting you on the Time Square billboard because you're great.
I mean no, no, And so when you self published, like you're right, Joe, you're doing all of the work yourself. You're doing the marketing, the promotion. It's just really it just depends on you know, everybody's situation is different. For me, you know, I didn't really you know, I was you know, these all started out actually as grad school projects. Really so I'm getting course credit for this, and I was like, hey, you know, I'd really like to publish this.
So I really didn't have any.
Connections to you know, big there's not a whole lot of big publishing companies anymore.
And not anymore consolidated.
Yeah, they've consolidated, and a lot of people just do ebooks because it's cheaper and easier to do. I mean, a lot of people publish ebooks to Amazon, and you know, you'll see thirty page books that are published on Amazon and like this this is a book. They'll sell them for ninety nine cents or whatever. But but you know, there's different ways of doing it that you can do audio books, you can do uh, you know, paperbacks, card backs, you can do digital e books, you know, Kindle versions.
So that's what's cool about the digital age that we live in now, too, is you can actually edit, Like like if I wanted to go and add a new chapter to my book, I can add that chapter and re upload it to Amazon, and now I have a new version of my book. That's cool as opposed to the old the olden days, where you know, you published a book and that's it. Like a newspaper. The newspaper is published. If there's a mistake in it, oh well it's out there. It's out there, and there's nothing that
we can done. So those are some of the you know, I guess comparisons between the two. I have a lot of friends that have done both. You know, if you if you're with a publisher, you might only be making three percent royalty, so that means you're gonna have to sell like millions of copies of books to you know, even make There's another stat only six percent of published authors earn a living. You know, like you're JK. Rowling
and you're you're James Patterson, you know, Tom Clancy. There's very few Stephen King, There's very very few of those that are Actually I'm a full time author and that's my salary. That's very difficult to to do it.
Plus I hear all those guys are weird as anyway in real life.
That may be true. That's how they get their stories.
Uh well, Jason, Man, this has been an enlightening conversation. Obviously, folks can go to Amazon. They can you know, we can link to your name where they can find your author's bio and where they can look at check out all the different books that you have written. But is there a specific place that folks can go like, yeah, let's share your website.
Yeah, man, the best place to go is my website is your Marginmatters dot com and on my homepage there's a link to my books. There's actually have a YouTube channel, so if you're frugal like me and you don't want to pay for one of my books, you can watch all my my YouTube videos for free, because that's all the cond it straight out of my books. So I have a YouTube channel there, I have a link to
my books. I've written some blogs on there as well, and there's some other resources on there on my website that I like to share with people too.
Well. You also write at how toomoney dot com on the rig so people if they're like, oh, I like that Jason guy, well you can go to how to money dot com and you can read more Jason stuff too. So Jason, we're glad to have you as a friend, glad to have you write and doing this work alongside us as well. And thanks so much for joining us today.
Man, thanks for having me and I just on a personal note, I really appreciate everything that you guys do for the money nerd community out there. I know you're helping a lot of people and I just want to say I really appreciate everything you guys do and keep up the good work, don't stop.
We will do our best. Thanks Jason. Joel.
All right, so yeah, Jay, we just said by to Jason, and of course you've got to take a minute to give our big takeaways. By the way, are you and are you and Jason going to go close shopping here soon?
Well, we were just talking about having guys. There's all the big intall stores, but what about just like tall, skinny weirdos, tall guys. They don't have stores for us for something. But yeah, what is your big takeaway from
our conversation with Jason Brown? For some reason, when early on when he was talking about the value proposition of a degree and kind of doing some sleuthing before you actually like, uh, you decide where you're gonna go and what kind of degree you're gonna get, And he said, maybe even hire a career coach. Dude, you stole. I'm like, I love I'll pivot. No, that was so good because an expert can, like that little bit of money spent on the front end can help you avoid a massive money.
Mistake and years it's sort of like just changing like imagine like the smallest little pivot like at the axis of something over time that has a huge change, like as you as you move something right.
Like a giant ship, changing the coursia of the rudder, just to exactly imagine a rudder.
It seems like such a small little tweak, a small pivot, a small change, and then all of a sudden, the ship is going in an entirely different direction.
Yeah.
So, yeah, that was gonna I was gonna mention that, and just honestly, as parent, I think we can start having some of these discussions with our kids earlier, which seems kind of ridiculous. I literally remember my dad talking about that maybe when I was thirteen or something like that.
But I think you're supposed to do it in utero. Matt, you're too late.
But you were saying that, like, hey, it's not too soon to start thinking about what you want to do. And I guess I just didn't take it seriously. And there's a certain level of maturity I think that also is required for you to maybe take that seriously and to start thinking about what you actually want to do.
But by the time I went to college, luckily I had scholarship and I went in state, but I spent a couple of years foundering, trying to figure out what it was that I wanted to do, and had I been able to zero in and focus on my area of study, it's okay to even say pay a little bit more for college. Certainly try to avoid debt as much as you can. It is possible, like Jason proved, but it would be worth it if you knew that that was one hundred percent the direction that you were
going to go. But man, going through the process of discovery and trying to figure things out, that's an expensive way to go about that, especially if you don't have scholarships, especially if you're going out of state, constantly changing majors, having a retake class. It was literally every year I was in a different school. I went from the science and then I hopped over to Terry for with business,
and then Franklin for ours. Like eventually I ended up in journalism over at Grady, which honestly kind of ironic considering I didn't think I'd end up being a podcaster. But yeah, no, I think that was that was great, But I wasn't really a career path at that point, right, Nobody could have coached in that direction, certainly was I think maybe there were a few those.
Pipes are amazing. You really going to this not yet invented medium. Yeah, yeah, so that was great.
I'm glad you mentioned that. My big takeaway, I'll go ahead and also mentioned and the ability ability to duel and en roll. I think that's something that should be on parents' radars a little bit sooner. I'm a little torn between the concept of like rushing through high school, you know, and kind of like, I don't know, there's a certain element of growing up too fast that kind of not rubs me the wrong way. But I'm I'm certainly going to be careful about that. But I think
there are happy medium approach. I want prolonged adolescents, but
you also don't want to like rush it so much. Yeah, you've graduated at college at the age of nineteen, and sure you're not as fully formed as a human and you miss out on some of the other experiences at college and even just the learning because yes, sure, maybe you placed out of certain classes because you're smart, or you're able to cram and pass via certain exams and placement placement exams, but were you able to actually absorb that knowledge where you Is that going to stick with you?
Are you going to be able to retain that. I think that's something to consider. You want to pay attention to the financials and be thinking about that, But at the same time, we don't want to all try to fast track our kids.
I think it's important to know what our kids are capable of. So I think the one other thing that Jason said that I thought really struck me was when he said, basically said, debt does not have to be a part of life, and we've kind of grown accustomed, We've noualized it. Yeah, we normalized it so much where
it's by now pay later. Like fifteen years ago, people have been like, what that's going to get in bended, That sounds crazy, and now I was like, Ah, it's just old hat, and so every day that's how people buy stuff and it doesn't have to be You said, it sounds kind of midwestern, it sounds kind of old school, and it does. But what sounds kind of quaint is probably the best way for you to be less stressed about your money and to be making more progress.
Totally.
Yeah, all right, let's get to our beer. We enjoyed a profit maker. This is a dry hop pale.
Ale by burial. What we were thoughts on this one, Buddy, pale ales, they're lighter than IPA's. They're not quite as dense and don't have quite as much body, But this one still had a bunch of hops, but it was definitely like a lighter medium for conveying those hops. So it kind of tasted like I've never actually like stuck my head in the clouds and stuck my tongue out, but it tasted kind of like that.
If if I were to do that, what I imagine it would taste like. It tastes like rain water. It tastes like snow. You see snow, and it's like the most beautiful thing, Like for some reason you think it's going to be sweet, but it's just like, yeah, it's rainwater that's frozen.
Yeah.
No. It certainly had that hoppy presence, grassy, It had like a grassiness to it, but with that lighter body. It's the perfect kind of pale ale, perfect kind of beer to enjoy on a warmer day like today. But yeah, glad you and I got to enjoy those today, and that is gonna be it. We'll make sure to link to where you can learn more about Jason up on the website. At howdomoney dot com.
We would have let Jason give a beer review, but he doesn't like beer. He's not a drinker, so yeah, he loves coffee and you know what, less on the beer friend, we're still his friend. Yeah, that's gonna be a buddy until next time. Best friend's out, best friends out,